As the winds of change gather pace
There is no storm yet. It seems to be brewing though, underneath and about to surface sooner than later.
The world of technology has a big problem. The problem of balancing ethics against profitability. It is not a new problem but it has been playing a Loch Ness-level hide and seek with the users and tech industry giants ever since the advent of AI in the mainstream.
The solution may change the landscape of the tech industry as we know it.
The mainstream AI - Hit or Miss
The big tech companies have struggled with the integration of AI into their products.
The struggle isn’t technical. The approach taken by the new players and the established ones seems to be similar, more humane, if I may add. It has more to do with the understanding of the use case of AI in their respective products.
The new player with its disruptive product seems to have grasped the best use of AI as a product. The plethora of applications on offer is impressive. They have all hit the mark.
- ChatGPT and all its versions
- Dall-E
- Sora
On the contrary, looking at the success of ChatGPT, I can’t help but think that Google missed its chance massively. Google in all their haste managed to make their core product worse with the integration of AI. What a farce!
Meta has had its own set of challenges with privacy, data harvesting, metaverse, and now with Meta AI. The problem again seems to be the ethical dilemma of adding AI to existing products like Instagram and causing a revolt within the user base, mass panic driving the creators into doubt or worse away from the platform.
Adobe is trying to turn every creator against itself with its updates to T&C over licensing of the content and training their AI on the user’s content.
Apple has been weirdly quiet in all this, as they usually seem to be towards jumping on the new tech bandwagon. When they do release something, usually late, it has the distinct apple fever. Apple Intelligence.
The introduction of AI might be hit or miss depending on where the question is directed but I believe it leads to us asking all the right questions.
The Algorithm way or the community way
Microsoft’s approach to the AI has been interesting. The early adoption with co-pilot has been quite a hit with the developer community. Their partnership with OpenAI going back to 2019 seems like a smart decision to take bigger leaps with the integration of AI in Microsoft products.
However, their latest announcement with Co-Pilot being integrated into Windows has not gone down well with the users to the extent that the conversation has steered towards the use of Linux.
Maybe finally this will be the decade of Linux. It may be the decade where the open-source community thrives.
On the same lines, Slack faced a lot of heat with their policy change with regards to AI where they wanted to train it on all the user data. It caused a lot of furor amongst users with some wanting to move away from Slack onto something more private or maybe something lacking the AI feature.
There seems to be a trend here about the way big tech is trying to drive their users into a frenzy with their AI policies.
The question here will be to wait and see if all this AI talk eventually drives users toward a more community-driven approach. Federated Apps have their issues, but that’s for another time.
Distributed and Federated for the win
For a very brief moment, we had this boom of distributed networks where it seemed like we finally had a new way of connecting, peer-to-peer networking supported by blockchain.
The dawn of new internet may have faded with initial hype but the way the age of AI is advancing, there is quite a good chance to reintroduce the experience of Web3 to the mainstream.
Web3 with the community-driven approach to open source software might be the way to go to break through the hold of big tech that have continuously shown a lack of understanding and empathy towards their core user base time and again in favor of revenues.